The Pointless Paranoia of the Women's Marches

I am no stranger to protesting, having marched so often in the sixties and seventies that I sometimes felt as if I were chanting "Hey, hey, LBJ" in my sleep. But I have come to think over the years that too much demonstrating can get to be a bad habit, like smoking.

Now I'm not talking here about the Gloria Steinems and Michael Moores, for whom protest is so much a way of life they couldn't exist without it. Or the Madonnas who, like other entertainment stalwarts, have business reasons for constantly reminding us they are still have their "edge" even as they age, liberally dropping the f-bomb and speculating about bombing the White House in the process.

I'm talking about the rest of us, especially, this weekend, a fair percentage of the women of America who descended on our nation's capital and elsewhere in impressive numbers.

Excuse me if I don't get it. What exactly was motivating them?

Oh, right, Donald Trump, that vulgar misogynist who bragged about pu**y grabbing (asterisks to dissociate myself from Madonna, even though I'm aging too). I'm going to skip over the obvious - these same women almost all ignored Bill Clinton actually doing (not just mouthing off about) similar activities in the Oval Office, not to mention on numerous other occasions, some of which we know about and some of which we may not. Further, these women didn't have much to say -- no demonstrations, no marches, maybe a few hashtags -- when radical Islamists of various stripes regularly kidnapped large numbers of women (Nigerians, Yazidis, Kurds, etc., etc.) from their homes and took them as sex slaves, often beheading them after they finished raping them. Nor did they even pipe up when honor killings were going on in their own backyard.

I could go on. But those are just, shall we say, a few of the minor inconsistencies mixed with, perhaps, a soupçon of cognitive dissonance. Something more must be motivating these hundreds of thousands of women.

Oh, yes, reproductive rights. Break out your clothes hangers. The Donald is going to bring back the era of backroom abortions

The idea that Trump, given his life and background, is a social conservative is almost silly. His primary issues were -- need I reiterate what must be drilled in all our brains -- bringing back jobs, lowering personal and corporate taxes, cutting excessive business and environmental regulations, ending illegal immigration, repealing and replacing Obamacare, rebuilding the military, extreme vetting of immigrants from countries where terrorism is prevalent, an America-first foreign policy (no nation building) and revived infrastructure.

On the campaign trail, the social issues were almost completely ignored. I listened to at least twenty of his speeches (probably a lot more) and can't recall his mentioning same-sex marriage even once. (He was known to be favorable to it years before Obama and Hillary "evolved" on the issue.)